his guests.

He must have drifted into a dream--and an extravagant one--for he
was master of Charleroi and Adele was his wife. She was coming out
to him now; he could hear her steps; he could feel her hand upon his
shoulder--

"_Pardon moi, M'shi Grande_"--it was Absalom's hand touching him, it
was Absalom's voice, speaking the _patois_ of the blacks--"but it is
eight o'clock."

Eight o'clock. Grandemont sprang up. In the moonlight he could see
the row of hitching-posts outside the gate. Long ago the horses of
the guests should have stood there. They were vacant.

A chanted roar of indignation, a just, waxing bellow of affront and
dishonoured genius came from Andre's kitchen, filling the house with
rhythmic protest. The beautiful dinner, the pearl of a dinner, the
little excellent superb jewel of a dinner! But one moment more of
waiting and not even the thousand thunders of black pigs of the
quarter would touch it!

"They are a little late," said Grandemont, calmly. "They will come
soon. Tell Andre to hold back dinner. And ask him if, by some
chance, a bull from the pastures has broken, roaring, into the
house."

He seated himself again to his cigarettes. Though he had said it,
he scarcely believed Charleroi would entertain company that night.
For the first time in history the invitation of a Charles had been
ignored. So simple in courtesy and honour was Grandemont, and,
perhaps, so serenely confident in the prestige of his name, that the
most likely reasons for the vacant board did not occur to him.

Charleroi stood by a road travelled daily by people from those
plantations whither his invitations had gone. No doubt even on the
day before the sudden reanimation of the old house they had driven
past and observed the evidences of long desertion and decay. They
had looked at the corpse of Charleroi and then at Grandemont's
invitations, and, though the puzzle or tasteless hoax or whatever
the thing meant left them perplexed, they would not seek its
solution by the folly of a visit to that deserted house.

The moon was now above the grove, and the yard was pied with deep
shadows save where they lightened in the tender glow of outpouring
candle light. A crisp breeze from the river hinted at the
possibility of frost when the night should have become older. The
grass at one side of the steps was specked with the white stubs of
Grandemont's cigarettes. The cotton-broker's clerk sat in his chair
with the smoke spiral